CHARLOTTE

Charlotte review by Roopayan Ghosh

Charlotte- An incomprehensible potpourri of ideas or another of Maeda's masterpiece??

This isn't one of my normal reviews its more informal, there will be a tl;dr at the end though. 

SPOILERS may follow.

So when the show aired I heard a lot of opinions of the show, some people said it was brilliant while others said it was shit. I trusted the shiteportion of the crowd more because I personally knew their tastes and steered clear of it. But then I had to download the anime for somebody else and had it in my HDD, so I was like whats the big deal lets see this anime, lets see how bad it is.

Firstly the premise, the trailer of animax made me think its a superpower action supernatural anime, the protagonist was a retarded asshole and an anti-hero who fought against the good guys etc etc, like maybe Reversi in Bakuman/ Code Geass etc. After watching the first episode I was taken aback. It was nothing of that sort, rather it was more mellow and school life action romance ish. It was even funny at times. It wasn't dark, depressing and thought provoking as I thought it might have been.
Which incidentally is not something I hate, I always like this light hearted school anime with a little bit of romance and SoL in it. And unlike most of the people who were complaining about this region of the show, I actually liked it and probably would have ended up loving it if this continued for the entire season, but no Maeda had other ideas, he had to go back to his staple idea of deaths and making people cry.

However this death had a problem. The anime was too short for him. maeda generally requires an insane amount of time to build characters. he had that in Clannad so he could produce something like Afterstory, he has all the time he likes in VNs as well, but in 13 episode anime, his style fails completely. Sure he tried to create a nice happy character and killed it off to generate tears, but he was too early, it didn't have impact. I don't remember not crying in anime deaths, or something which I watched without batting an eye, but here I did, and I was surprised. Instantly it made me realize this show wasnt one of his good ones.

Then he did what he does best, showing how a loved one deals with the death of another one. He went to extremes here, but I don't really mind, but the lack of episodes showed here as well, while in his masterpiece afterstory he had 5-6 episodes to develop the pain and suffering and then bring it to a resolution, here he has one. And to combine all that emotion to one episode is just not possible. He tried his best but it didn't work out.

But the sad part he he didn't stop there, he got into the time travel business. While i wouldn't say he messed it up completely, but a feeling which Steins; gate took 20 episodes to build, cannot be built in 1 episode. he didnt set proper laws for time travel(which is very essential) and so this part of the anime falls below mediocrity. Also he put in an underwear shot which I found absolutely unnecessary(why would you strip an esper, duh? ) and some sudden invasion of new villains to drive the story. Then the protag does some stupid shit and a person dies again. This death was slightly more impactful since he had more episodes at his disposal, but by this time the anime was on its last lap so there was no time to let the effects of it sink inAbout the ending which people bash, i will not, because this wasn't an adventure anime. I am sure people wanted more stories, more interactions with the new challenges our protagonist would face but to be honest he was so Op at that time that it didn't matter.Well there were parts I actually liked as well. the protagonist's character development wasn't too shabby, though the female character development was a dirac delta function(search this term on wiki) and so was the romance. But maeda being maeda still gave me something to smile about in the romance. And then totally destroys the atmosphere by putting in cheezy ending line. "Our life starts from here". Seriously Maeda, that's the best you could come up with?? I put the screenshot I think should have ended it etc along with the pictures.
tl;dr:- I cant call it shit, I have seen worse anime than this and this is definitely better than your generic harems and esper stories like Tokyo ESP and stuff, but its definitely one of the worse Maeda works. he should stick to VN. the anime medium is too restrictive for him.

So ratings Art and Animation-7/10, Music-7/10, Story-3.5/10, characters-3.5/10, enjoyment-6/10(27/50) remember this is MAL scale and different from my previous scale of 7/10 as average.